In fact, reading these sentences with ad-lib on the subject tends to give these sentences interestingly different connotations.
See Joscha Bach’s claim about religions not publishing their A|B testing at 51:47:
“Corporations are people, my friend.”
Yes yes I know, open source models exist, yadda yadda
I think it's safe to say the overwhelming amount of AI usage in the world today is gates by corporations though. The vast majority of people will barely configure their own OS nevermind managing their own locally hosted open source AI instance
You can’t push both “If you dont work, you dont eat” and “Nobody needs to work anymore” propaganda at the same time. Gotta choose
Let's suppose that we did get UBI, and AI replaced most jobs. Then we'll basically just have the wealthy elite who control the resources and the AIs, and everyone else who live off of the basic income, with no real way to increase their wealth. That still sounds dystopian to me.
And to be clear, I am not at all opposed to a better safety net, but it should be a safety net, not a replacement for employment for most of the population.
Also, I don't think it is very likely that AI will replace everyone's job. But I am worried that it will result in shrinking the middle class, and increasing wealth disparity.
Edit: Someone replied to this with a question. I'm rate-limited here for getting into a flamewar with a PRC citizen that was gloating to me about my country being possibly invaded soon (which, fair, flamewars are bad), so I'll need to put my reply below:
There's no exact road map, but generally speaking, in our capitalist countries today, wealth started out more distributed, and governments had more power, in the beginning of their liberalization. States often competed in markets or simply nationalized things like power, healthcare, education. Ongoing examples of that are lots of places in Europe.
With the advent of neoliberalism (Thatcher, Reagan), concentrated capital converts more easily to political power in an exponential manner - more money, more ability to buy government, leads to more money, more ability to buy government.
Corporations are profit generation algorithms. They want the profit to always go up, and when they run against the barriers of laws (restricting their environmental impact, ability to underpay their workers, create cheap and dangerous working environments, do international trade in some way), naturally the next investment step is to remove those barriers.
So, early capitalism is strong regulation, socialized services and infrastructure, government competition, some nationalization, and private ownership of the means of production.
Late stage capitalism is weak/no regulation, no services, privatized infrastructure, no government competition, no nationalization, sectors tending towards monopolization, and wealth concentration.
"Raw capitalism" is where the commodification of everything is complete.
Can you explain, what would be early capitalism and what is the difference to "end game capitalism" to you?
I wonder if this sort of thing got this dude elected, to navigate the changing times.
(duplicating my comment from the other thread as this seems to have more traction)
Of course it's annoying if a single sentence is blown up into a page of prose by AI and an AI summarizes it into a different sentence on the other end :)
Side note: (a) This new pope is very good at "political rhetoric" and (dare I say) polemic. He's a lot more relevant than recent popes. (b) There seems to have been a vibe shift, re: secular sentiments towards religion.
There is potentially a lot happening at this intersection... say catholicism and AI.
For example... LLMs make scripture a lot more accessible. That tends to be impactful, historically. It's Augustine, Aquinas, Spinoza and Schmidt. This kind of thing is a niche interest... even among the faithful, but an important niche. And... it just answers your questions, patiently.
It's also a therapist, confidant and advice giver... potentially a confessor or priest. Talk of "making an AI god" got a little stale, but... there are many ways that LLMs might take god-like roles in people's lives.
Predictions are futile, but I suspect we are going to see AI encroachment into religious/spiritual domains. I further suspect that good, natural, conversational audio is the bottleneck.
Personally... I'm curious about this Pope/AI thing. I find it interesting.
They sue for peace in Ukraine / Middle East, humane treatments of immigrants, warn against nuclear weapons, AI, etc..
I go to Church often, there's always a prayer for peace during Mass.
What I like about Pope Leo is that he's talking about current issues that affect people.
I think the Church spent way too much time focusing on matters of sexuality and causing problems. While those are still important, it appears that it's no longer the sole focus of the Church, which is a good thing.
Another thing that I really like is the unification efforts with other religions _and_ Protestants.. recently we had a female Protestant Bishop meeting with the Pope, that was wonderful to watch.
Amazing insight from an organization not traditionally known for a deep understanding of high technology.
But sure, at least they didn't have AI! lol!
In other words, Warhammer 40K but without any aliens to trigger a massive xenophobic response that removed all warlike guardrails.
It's not like people are longing for times of papal authority, they're just looking for anyone at all with common sense.
For evidence, you only have to look at the mass of flagged and downvoted anti-AI comments on this site.
It's not a hidden force at all, they're quite open about it.
abortion after birth? as in, killing a newborm baby? what are you even talking about
None of these will go away until something breaks catastrophically, when it will be too late. And even then it will be short repose from another iteration for as long as we are in the digital information age.
There are only two steady end states that I see... either a global surveillance totalitarian system under the industrial complex, or, a radical change of the environment in which the aforementioned can be sustained.
> 110. Finally, I would like to employ the expression “to disarm,” which is close to my heart. Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of “armed” competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon. This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance. To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life. Our task today is not only ethical or technical. It is ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home. AI is already an environment in which we are immersed, as well as a force with which we must engage. For this reason, merely regulating it is insufficient; it must be disarmed, welcoming and accessible.
Particularly ironic considering the history of the Church.
I mean, it is not wrong, but that's essentially the business of essentially every church, religion, cult,... whatever you call your spiritual organization.
Between the Canadian residential schools and sexual abuse scandals alone, it's shocking that people actually look to the holy see as any kind of moral authority. Nevermind the connections to slavery, fascism, and even the cosa nostra.
If a technology existed that reduced the cost of producing a critical thing (think food, housing, medical care) down to near zero, however, it made the humans currently building the thing redundant, should we build it? Would it be okay to use the hyper-optimization power of Capitalism to build such a technology faster?
Before someone yells at me about this not being the current situation, I think that is the endgame of most of this AI development and in fact the endgame is even more comforting: If it takes 10 construction workers at $60,000/annum to build one home, I can forsee the descendants of current AI tech enabling 10 construction workers at $150,000/annum building 5 homes in the same time with an even larger profit margin for the corporation involved.
But as a clear moral quandary, I think the Pope should consider the first situation.
"AI must be used for the good of humanity" isn't even an anti ai position really.
Why..not both? I know this question is naive, but there is nothing that "hard-codes" AI to only increase profits at the cost of providing food or housing for much cheaper prices. Yes a Private equity firm could later insert itself and jack up prices and play such games, but that isn't baked into the technology itself.
And as such, the technology seems the wrong thing to be litigating.
At this point, tech biz leaders are massively over-reaching and trying to influence the rest of us: muxk, thiel, Karp, etc.
So it should be no surprise that the rest of us are ready, willing and able to push back just as hard.
tech biz leads should just run their companies and stop trying to play president or god
I realize this is what's happening on the headlines, but most of the technology being "deployed" is back-office automation, robotics etc. that no one writes about and none of the tech baddies have monopolistic control over. I refuse to let muxk, thiel, Karp to run the conversation and setup the reaction either. It is exciting and dramatic but not necessarily influential.
I don't think anyone has an answer to that question at present, honestly.
Jesus let the Romans take him. The pope drives around in an armoured car with hundreds of soldiers. Why? After all, he’s the official spokesperson of God. He’s either untouchable, or would be endlessly rewarded with sainthood for being a martyr.
But he obviously doesn’t believe that.
By then we might not even have computers anymore, or we might have "transparent" computers, i.e. have everything on the cloud and just tell our AI agents what to do.
Sorry Pope Leo, things are not going to suddenly turn into a wonderful utopia, but maybe buy some stocks so you can at least make a buck from what's coming.
The pope is not claiming utopia is possible. He is reminding the world of its moral duties within this scope. "Capitalism" is not a system that we helpless atoms merely get pushed around in. How good the world is depends on each one of us choosing to do our moral duty toward the common good. There is no "system" that will, without effort on the part of its citizens, straighten the crooked timber of humanity and relieve human beings of their moral responsibilities.
With that out of the way, the Pope is right. Knowledge should be used for the benefit of humanity and I don't think any of the big AI companies have our best interests in mind.
You can still follow a religion while rightfully thinking that the organization representing it to be corrupt (and how could it be otherwise, as it's made from mortal sinners?).
But you either believe that St.Peter and its descendants in Rome have been tasked by god to spread (and interpret) its word or you don't.
It's fine if you don't (I don't my self, I'm an atheist), but I don't get why can't you be a catholic if you believe and also find the organization flawed.
Plus personal and social experiences are often catalysts for changing one’s beliefs. It happens so often there’s a term for it: “crisis of faith”
The whole point of faith is that it’s a subjective opinion that cannot be proven.
Arguing that someone’s faith isn’t logical is about as sensible as arguing which shade of blue looks more wet.
My point is that once you see a sort of contradiction between words and action, it may make one deeply reflect on it.
What you do is your business, but you understand the fallacy, yes? One does not belong to the Church for the priests. And btw, if you want to be consistent, you should dissociate yourself from all institutions, because statistically, the rate of abuse in the Church (estimated by John Jay to be around 4%) is representative or less than the rates in all other religious or secular institutions. Public schools are notoriously bad in this regard, but you wouldn't know it, given the obsessive coverage of the Church to the exclusion of everyone else.
(I, of course, condemn all such sexual abuse, and I am critical of those who failed to deal with the issue properly. There is indeed a sense in which abuse by a priest carries much more gravity, and this is the position of the Church itself. Sexual abuse also peaked during the heyday of the sexual revolution, roughly during the 1960s-1980s. It wasn't a pedophilia scandal, as around 80% of victims were post-pubescent male teenagers. It was a homosexual ephebophilia scandal. Still terrible, but it does shift understanding of the nature and source of the problem significantly.)
> I am aware of the Catholic Church's long and often sordid history.
Sure, if you simply accept the ignorant tropes, ideological propaganda, and black legends circulating in a culture hostile to the institution since the Reformation and the Enlightenment, then maybe you'll be left with a dramatically dark picture that you describe as "sordid". But this is historically illiterate and intellectually immature.
I feel like this pseudo-defence hidden in the middle of your few paragraphs tells the reader what they really ought to know. Making that distinction is enough to question your nature to be allowed around vulnerable people.
If you don't see a difference of gravity between sexually abusing prepubescent children and post-pubescent teenagers, then I question your capacity to make moral judgements. Perhaps you'll attack someone for recognizing that murder is worse than rape, too.
And frankly, the libelous phrase "question your nature to be allowed around vulnerable people" that you directed toward me is utterly disgusting. How dare you.
But then, you've already demonstrated your comfort with false accusations.
Honestly pretty unreal to come face to face with someone from a history book.
Still, I agree with the pope this once.
They did a lot to make the middle ages more tolerable. After that, maybe they overstayed their welcome.
Child Protection: Companies must not be allowed to exploit children or undermine their wellbeing with AI interactions creating emotional attachment or leverage
I think it entirely consistent with many of the supporters of this statement that this leaves open the opportunity for the church to do it with AI, or indeed companies and the church to do it by other means.
In the first case, I claim that it has and that it does. I'm not sure how you can credibly claim otherwise. Only ideologically informed animosity could distort one's views here. If you know the mission of the Church, then I see no issue. Do members of the Church fail? Of course. Everyone does, and indeed this is captured best in the Christian acknowledgment that everyone is a sinner, without exception. Everyone falls short.
In the second case, I don't know what the implication is. Is it that the Church is one of the "powerful few" and therefore evil? The first question you must ask is what your notion of "power" here is. The second, whether the Church is actually powerful according to that definition. The third, whether you are falsely linking being one of the "powerful few" with being evil. The problem, after all, is not with power, but with the way power is used. In an ideal world, all power would be exercised morally, and all authority would have commensurate power.
I would say this: the Church has authority. Whether it has power depends on your definition of power and the particular historical epoch. It is not reduced to a simple boolean.
It's best to avoid cheap jabs that rely on boring and unthinking tropes that appeal to widespread prejudices rather than to informed reason.
This is not true at all.
And the claim about mission of the church and mission of the ai being the same is absurd. Or ai being authority. Like, the rest of that comment does not apply to ai at all.
In what sense is it not true?
> mission of the church and mission of the ai being the same is absurd
Did I claim that?
I just said any point you wrote against church representing powerful few is applicable to AI.
(Axiom: B has done X.)
A (to B): You have done X, and you should not have done so.
C: I note here that certain prior actions of A could also reasonably be characterized as X.
D (to C): Ah, here you commit the fallacy of "tu quoque".
This argument is not sound. It misunderstands the fallacy. (To be clear: Wikipedia describes the fallacy accurately; it's just that it's rare in practice, and very often falsely accused.)
Everyone should uphold the standards to which they hold others (and I consider it an obvious moral failing not to do so). The fallacy only applies where C either continues on to argue that B has, somehow, not actually done X (because A did); or, at least, clearly has the purpose of distracting from the fact that B has done X.
But there is nothing fallacious about simply pointing out that A does not live up to A's own implied standards. There is nothing fallacious about the implication that A is therefore being either i) dishonest about the anti-X belief, or ii) simply hypocritical. (To be fair, we don't know, from the given information, which of those is the case; but I think it's fair to say that neither is "fair dealing" and that A is thus a legitimate target of criticism regardless.)
It is also not fallacious for C to use this as a jumping-off point to argue that X is in fact okay to do, although of course this requires further support.
The Catholic Church has always had this go on.
Yes I do. I don't think you a prayer can literally transform wine into blood. How about you?
https://www.vatican.va/archive/compendium_ccc/documents/arch...
283
> Transubstantiation means the change of the whole substance of bread into the substance of the Body of Christ and of the whole substance of wine into the substance of his Blood. This change is brought about in the eucharistic prayer through the efficacy of the word of Christ and by the action of the Holy Spirit. However, the outward characteristics of bread and wine, that is the “eucharistic species”, remain unaltered.
Some deeper discussion around Aquinas' philosophy on the difference: https://iep.utm.edu/thomas-aquinas-metaphysics/#H4
But I'd say any Catholic who believes in the Eucharist would admit, yeah, it's a bit of an odd thing, especially by today's standards, to consume the blood of a sacrificed animal.
So you know, you might want to adjust your measuring stick before you critique people.
That claims is, very simply, a lie.
https://www.vatican.va/archive/compendium_ccc/documents/arch...
283
> Transubstantiation means the change of the whole substance of bread into the substance of the Body of Christ and of the whole substance of wine into the substance of his Blood. This change is brought about in the eucharistic prayer through the efficacy of the word of Christ and by the action of the Holy Spirit. However, the outward characteristics of bread and wine, that is the “eucharistic species”, remain unaltered.
Edit: It's a catholic thing, and it's very silly (other denominations say its symbolic)
The simplification in the original in fact imploed that.
This message is not focused on u.s or its presidents. Its focused on leadership world wide.
Trump was always attention sucking drama queen. So yes, voting for him is a vote to have Trump in news worldwide.
And we shouldn't criticize them? Is that the point?
And the current President's ridiculous beliefs are just as ridiculous as believing in transubstantiation. Believing angels manifest on Earth and intercede in human affairs is no more rational believing that aliens are manifesting on Earth but are really demons, which Catholic VP JD Vance believes. The former is just more culturally accepted, and thus given the weight of dignity, but both are valid as far as a naive and literalist interpretation of the Bible is concerned, because demons exist in the Bible, but not aliens.
Either way, as much as the Pope is a silly man in a silly hat looking like a fucking wizard who is required to believe in supernatural nonsense while leading a corrupt den of pedophiles, he's also absolutely and objectively correct on this specific topic and it's clear he's put far more researched thought into his opinions on AI than 99% of people on HN. Hell, he even apologized for the Church's historical support of slavery, and many people here won't even concede that slavery was ever a problem.
Talk about nonsense.
Nope. Straight to hell. Do not pass ‘Go’, do not collect 200 virgins.
To be honest, I did have some very in depth conversations with religious friends, and it was enlightening. I am convinced that for them, it has some benefits.
But I know all this stuff is totally made up, so even if you can channel it to a good thing, I personally can never do it. And even though I won't say this to their face, part of me thinks, how can you believe this stuff.
https://www.wordonfire.org/articles/debunking-the-myth-of-va...
Its still true. The church gained massive amount of land in germany due to the fear they put into humans. Hell, purgatory etc.
The church owns 2% of land in germany. A f. church...
You don't have to agree with everything to Pope stands for to understand the potential dark paths AI could lead humanity to.
Uh, who?
Smoke of course; but did you find fire?